The volume of information produced in the Mongol Empire required new
forms of dissemination. Scribes could no longer handle the follow of
laboriously hand copying everything that need to be written. They compiled
the records, wrote letters, and sent information to those who need it,
but they did not have time to copy agricultural manuals, medical treatises,
atlases, and astronomical tables. Information had to be mass-produced
for mass dissemination, and for this task, the Mongols turned again
to technology, to printing.

The Mongols adopted printing technology very early. In addition to the
printings sponsored by Toregene during the reign of her husband, beginning
in 1236 Ogedei ordered the establishment of a series of regional printing
facilities across the Mongol-controlled territory of northern China.
Printing with moveable letters probably began in China in the middle
of the twelfth century, but it was the Mongols who employed it on a
massive scale and harnessed its potential power to the needs of state
administration. Instead of the printing with thousand of characters,
as the Chinese did, the Mongols used an alphabet in which the same letters
were used repeatedly. Under the Mongols, printers carved out many copies
of each letter that could be then arranged in whatever word was needed.
Each time the printer wanted a new page of print, instead of carving
the whole text, he needed to merely place the right sequence of already
carved letters into position, use them, and then wait until the next
printing job, when they could be rearranged and then used again.

General literacy increased during the Mongol dynasty, and the volume
of literary materiel grew proportionately. In 1269, Khubilai Khan established
a printing office to make government decisions more widely disseminated
throughout the population, and he encouraged widespread printing in
general by nongovernmental groups as well. This included religious books
and novels in addition to government publications. The number of books
in print increased so dramatically that their price fell constantly
throughout the era of Mongol rule. Presses throughout the Mongol Empire
were soon printing agriculture pamphlets, almanacs, scriptures, laws,
histories, medical treatises, new mathematical theories, songs, and
poetry in many languages.

Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal
alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs,
money or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed
a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to
impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems
from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the
Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They
searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it
to other countries. They did not have to worry whether their astronomy
agreed with the precepts of the Bible, that their standards of writing
followed the classical principals taught by the mandarins of China,
or that Muslim imams disapproved of their printing and painting. The
Mongols had the power, at least temporarily to impose new international
systems of technology, agriculture, and knowledge that superseded the
predilections or prejudices of any single civilization; and in so doing,
they broke the monopoly on thought exercised by local elites.

Excerpt from pages 232 to 234

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Writings on Genghis Khan

The imagery of Mongol greatness received its clearest statement around
1390 by Geoffrey Chaucer, who had traveled widely in France and Italy
on diplomatic business and had a far more international perspective
than many of the people for whom he wrote. In The Canterbury Tales,
the first book written in English, the longest tale relates a romantic
and fanciful tale about the life and adventures of Genghis Khan.

This
noble king was called Genghis Khan,
Who in his time was of great renown
That there was nowhere in no region
So excellent a lord in all things.
He lacked nothing that belonged to a king.
As of the sect of which he was born
He kept his law, to which that he was sworn.
And thereto he was hardy, wise, and rich,
And piteous and just, always liked;
Soothe of his word, benign, and honorable,
Of his courage as any center stable;
Young, fresh, and strong, in arms desirous
As any bachelor of all his house.
A fair person he was and fortunate,
And kept always so well royal estate
That there was nowhere such another man.
This noble king, the Tartar Genghis Khan.

Excerpt from pages 239 and 240

Christopher Columbus’s View of the Mongol Court

Columbus embarked on his journey to find the Mongols while carrying
with him a printed copy of Marco Polo’s travels, into which he
had jotted copious notes and observations for his planned arrival at
their court. For Columbus, Marco Pole was not merely an inspiration
but also a practical guide. When he reached Cuba after visiting smaller
islands, Columbus believed that he was on the edge of the Great Khan’s
realm and would soon find the Mongol kingdom of Cathay. Columbus remained
convinced that the land of the khan lay a little farther to the north
within what we today recognize as the mainland of the United States.
Since he had not found the land of the Great Khan of the Mongols, he
decided that the people he met must be the southern neighbors of the
Mongols in India, and thus Columbus called the native people of the
Americas Indians, the name by which they have been know ever since.

Excerpt from page 254

Development of European Anti-Asian & Anti-Mongol Views During
the Enlightenment Period

Whereas the Renaissance writers and explorers treated Genghis Khan
and the Mongols with open adulation, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
in Europe produced a growing anti-Asian spirit that often focused on
the Mongols, in particular, as the symbol of everything evil or defective
in that massive continent. As early as 1748, the French philosopher
Montesquieu set the tone in his treatise The Spirit of the Laws, holding
the Asian in haughty contempt and blaming much of their detestable qualities
on the Mongols, whom he labeled, “the most singular people on
earth.” He described them as both servile slaves and cruel masters.
He attributed to them all the major attacks on civilization from ancient
Greece to Persia: “They have destroyed Asia, from India even to
the Mediterranean; and all the country which forms the east of Persia
they have rendered a desert.” Montesquieu glorified the tribal
origins of Europeans as the harbingers of democracy while he condemned
the tribal people of Asia: “The Tartars who destroyed the Grecian
Empire established in the conquered countries slavery and despotic power:
the Goths, after subduing the Roman Empire, founded monarchy and liberty.”
Based on this history, he summarily dismissed all of Asian civilization:
“There reigns in Asia a servile spirit, which they have never
been able to shake off, and it is impossible to find in all the histories
of that country a single passage which discovers a freedom of spirit;
we shall never see anything there but the excess of slavery.”

Genghis Khan became the central figure of attack. Voltaire adapted a
Mongol dynasty play, The Orphan of Chao, by Chi Chün-hsiang, to
fit his personal political and social agenda by portraying Genghis Khan,
whom Voltaire used as a substitute for the French king, as an ignorant
and cruel villain. The Orphan of China, as he renamed it, debuted on
the Paris stage in 1755 while Voltaire enjoyed safe exile in Switzerland.
“I have confined my plan to the grand epoch of Genghis Khan,”
he explained. “I have endeavored to describe the manners of the
Tartars and Chinese: the most interesting events are nothing when they
do not paint the manners; and this painting, which is one of the greatest
secrets of the art, is no more than an idle amusement, when it does
not tend to inspire notions of honor and virtue.” Voltaire described
Genghis Khan as “The king of kings, the fiery Genghis Khan/Who
lays the fertile fields of Asia waste.” He called him “a
wild Scythian soldier bred to arms/And practiced in the trade of blood.”
In Voltaire’s revisionist history, the Mongols warriors were no
more than the “wild sons of rapine, who live in tents, in chariots,
and in the fields.” They “detest our arts, our customs,
and our laws; and therefore mean to change them all; to make this splendid
seat of empire one vast desert, like their own.”
Genghis Khan’s only redeeming quality, in Voltaire’s play,
was that he reluctantly recognized the moral superiority of the better
educated. “The more I see,” Voltaire quoted Genghis Khan
as saying, “the more I admire this wondrous people, great in arts
and arms, in learning and in manners great; their kings on wisdom’s
basis founded all their power.” Genghis Khans ended the play with
a question: “…what have I gained by all my victories, by
all my guilty laurels stained with blood?” To which Voltaire answered:
“…the tears, the sighs, the curses of mankind.” With
these words, Voltaire himself began the modern cursing of the Mongols.

Excerpt from pages 254 and 255

The Eternal Spirit of Genghis Khan

The clash between
the nomadic and urban cultures did not end with Genghis Khan, but it
would never again reach the level to which he brought it. Civilization
pushed the tribal people toward the ever more distant edges of the world.
Chiefs such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Lakota Sioux, Red
Eagle of the Muskogee, Tecumseh of the Shawnee, and Shaka Zulu of South
Africa valiantly continued the quest of Genghis Khan over the coming
centuries. Without knowing anything about the Mongols or Genghis Khan,
these other chiefs faced the same struggles and fought the same battles
across Africa and throughout the Americas, but history had moved beyond
them. In the end, sedentary civilization won the long world war; the
future belonged to the civilized children of Cain, who eternally encroached
upon the open lands of the tribes.

Although he arose out of the ancient tribal past, Genghis Khan shaped
the modern world of commerce, communication, and large secular states
more than any other individual. He was the thoroughly modern man in
his mobilized and professional warfare and in his commitment to global
commerce and the rule of international secular law. What began as a
war of extinction between the nomad and farmer ended as a Mongol amalgamation
of cultures. His vision matured as he aged and as he experienced different
ways of life. He worked to create something better for his people. The
Mongol armies destroyed the uniqueness of the civilizations around them
by shattering the protective walls that isolated one civilization from
another and by knotting the cultures together.